A tiny mouse, a hacker.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 24th, 2023

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  • If any of those end up interacting with me, or I otherwise see them on my timeline, they’ll get treated appropriately: reported, blocked, or in extreme cases, served garbage interactions to. Serving garbage to 500+ bots is laughably easy. Every day I have over 5 million requests from various AI scrapers, from thousands of unique IP addresses, and I serve them garbage. It doesn’t make a blip on my tiny VPS: in just the past 24 hours, I served 5.2M requests from AI scrapers, from ~2100 unique IP addresses, using 60Mb memory and a mere 2.5 hours of CPU time. I can do that on a potato.

    But first: they have to interact with me. As I am on a single-user instance, chances are, by the time any bot would get to try and spam me, a bigger server already had them reported and blocked (and I periodically review blocks from larger instances I trust, so there’s a good chance I’d block most bots before they have a chance of interacting with me).

    This is not a fight bots can win.


  • Personally, I do not have any automatism to detect LLMs larping as people. But I do review accounts that follow or interact with mine, and if I find any that are bots, I’ll enact counter measures. That may involve reporting them to their server admin (most instances don’t take kindly to such bots), blocking their entire instance, or in extreme cases, start serving them garbage interactions.






  • If they have no desire to maintain/sysadmin their own linux systems, then the best distro to recommend is whatever you can help them with, and possibly even maintain for them.

    Case in point, my Wife is a very happy NixOS user, despite knowing absolutely nothing about Linux. Yet, she’s on a distribution that’s as far from being newbie friendly as a distro can possibly be. She’s still happy with it, because I set it up for her, and I maintain it for her, she never has to install, upgrade or configure anything, ever.


  • I’d say “under no circumstances”. When building for production, you want to build on a stable foundation. LFS isn’t that, it’s an educational tool. It does not result in a maintainable, robust system. It requires tremendous amounts of work to keep it secure and updated: there’s no package manager, no repository you can pull from, no nothing. You have to build an entire distribution on your own. Outside of educational purposes, I’m having trouble to imagine any situation where that might be a good idea.

    No, not even embedded. There were always distros targetting embedded systems, LFS was never a good choice there either. It was much more straightforward to strip down - say - Debian for a limited device, than to build something from scratch for it. (I spent a few years building and operating embedded Linux systems at the early 2000s, we built it on a stripped down Debian.)




  • Does the target layer (the number layer) have to be a layer number greater than the starting layer? Number layer is layer 4, and QWERTY is 9 - do I need to move 4 to 10? Is there some other, common, issue I’m encountering?

    Yes, you’ll need to move the number layer, to have a higher index than the QWERTY layer. In QMK, layers are index-ordered (see the docs here), no matter the order you activate them. If you activate layer 9 (qwerty) and layer 4 (numpad), then even if you activated layer 4 later, it will still be below layer 9. So any key that is not transparent on 9, will be looked up from 9. Only transparent keys will be looked up from layers below.





  • In our kids’ elementary school, the rule at the start of year was that kids tell the teacher they have to go, then they simply go. Notifying the teacher is mandatory, 'cos they are responsible for the kids, they need to know where they are.

    This was slightly changed since, because of bullies. While the vast majority of kids can go to the bathroom whenever they want, bullies don’t: they can only go alone, or supervised. So if there’s anyone else out, from any class, they have to wait. If it is urgent, a teacher or another adult will go with them, and stand by the door, close enough to intervene if need be.


  • algernon@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlDo you use Gnome or KDE Plasma?
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    3 months ago

    Both KDE and GNOME are good DEs (and there are many other great ones, and you don’t even need to use a DE; a mismash of applications with your compositor of choice works just aswell - but I digress), you can’t really go wrong with either.

    For someone new to Linux, I would likely recommend GNOME, because it is more opinionated. While KDE is a lot more configurable, that also has a huge downside: configuration fatigue. GNOME is more restrictive, yes, but that has the advantage of not overwhelming you right out of the box.

    If you like and wish to tinker, though, go with KDE. If you want to gently ease into Linux, go with GNOME first, and once you’re comfortable, you can still experiment with KDE. You can install both, and switch between them simply by logging out of one and into the other.


  • To add some nuance to the rest of the comments posted here: GPL’d code can be made proprietary, if the copyright holders all agree. For example, given a project that requires copyright assignment, if the project owner decides to take it proprietary, they can do that, because they’re the copyright owner. GPL alone is not enough to keep a codebase FLOSS. Luckily, both the kernel and git have hundreds of copyright owners (and does not require copyright assignment), so legally changing the license of either of them is practically impossible. So, really, Linus wouldn’t be able to take anything, code wise. He could take his future work, yeah, but he hasn’t been doing much development for the past decade.

    Otherwise… He let go of git pretty early on, and it’s been maintained by Junio ever since. So nothing would happen there whatsoever, Linus’ retirement (friendly or otherwise) would be inconsequential for git.

    The kernel has capable maintainers who have been maintaining stable trees for a long while now (often with companies backing them), and people who have been maintaining large subtrees. There’s a considerable overlap there, too. In short, there are a fair number of people who could fill in for Linus in a pinch. There’d be a small hiccup, and that’s about it. His skills and experience would be missed, but it wouldn’t cause any lasting harm.


  • My bank app does not function under Graphene, because my bank is doing anything in its power to force using a stock Android. I have friends, who use the same bank, and while the bank app works under Graphene from time to time, it is broken often enough to render it unusable.

    But it doesn’t matter, because Graphene does not support my phone anyway. As I wrote: most alternative operating systems for phones support only a very limited set of phones. Mine’s not one of them.


  • On desktop: Linux since late 1996. It is the only operating system that I can perfectly tune to adhere to my - often weird - ideas, and can run all the software I need. I’m a developer, mostly working on free and open source software, so Linux is right there to assist me with that. When I play games, I play them through Wine/Proton, have been since I started gaming on Linux some two decades ago. If a game does not work under Wine/Proton, that’s simply not a game I will be playing.

    For portable gaming, I have a Steam Deck. Surprisingly, that also runs Linux.

    My phone is running stock Android, and I hate it, because the way I function, and how Android imagines I would are not compatible, and the system does not let me bend it to my will, there isn’t enough flexibility built in. Like… I can’t uninstall a bunch of applications I’m never going to use, because my phone came preinstalled with it, and they’re not removable, unless I jailbreak it. Unfortunately, I can’t jailbreak it, because then my bank’s application would stop working. Which would be fine, since I don’t do banking on the phone. Except the application is required for mandatory 2FA. FML.

    Thankfully, I can go days without touching my phone, so I can live with it being a piece of crap.

    (The rest of my family is also on Linux: both parents, wife, and eventually the kids too.)